As always we are in demand for birthday reptile party shows in Melbourne. Doing the only hands on reptile displays always makes us sought after and the kids not only have fun, but learn at the same time.

For mums and dads the reptile show is a breeze as the handler does the work in terms of keeping the kids entertained during their birthday event.
Other than lining up some food, cutting cake and taking photos there is not a huge amount of work needed by the mums and dads at the party.
With winter approaching and the weather cooling, outdoor birthday activities are becoming riskier in terms of the likelihood of bad weather. However the wildlife party shows are not affected this way. They can be done indoors and so no one gets wet. Of even greater advantage is that with the reptiles not eating as much over winter, the kids aren’t even likely to get peed on or pooped upon at their party.
There is only one kids reptile partiescompany in Melbourne and they are the one owned by the snake man who owns the trademark. All the rest are merely imitators.

Recently we went to a massive reptile expo in centre of Melbourne, in Australia and the children’s activities included being able to hold the animals at the stand of a demonstrator. So we decided to try our hand with a kids reptile party show.

Kids birthday parties are a make and break affair. If the child and his friends have a good time, the event will be remembered for a lifetime. Failure can mean one of those many events consigned to the dustbin of forgettable events or expos that fade into distant memories.

To make sure that the birthday party is good one and trouble free one can do all sorts of things to make the day a success. Party food and decorations can be bought anywhere in Victoria and while do it on your own was the standard procedure for parents until recent times, this is no longer the case.

With the mega rich, famous and celebrities pioneered the use of entertainers for kids party shows, it didn’t take long for ordinary working class mums and dads to get in on the action.

Hired professionals sprung up all over the place to do hired party entertainment for all kinds of kids.

Many are professional entertainers in other fields, such as corporate team building, circuses, indoor play centres, mini golf, farm hands and the like, with weekend party entertainment being a mere extension of their overall way to earn a living.

Parents planning their kids parties in Melbourne, Victoria and all other parts of Australia can now hire all form and manner of entertainer to help make the day a more fun occasion. Even people in remote places have a range of alternative entertainers on offer, the only impediment being the cost of travel to get them to your venue. However a lot of entertainers subsidize travel as they view it as a kind of paid holiday.

For most parents the costs of hiring an entertainer is affordable and in the range of a few hundred dollars. The cost factor isn’t so daunting when one considers that if one does it oneself, there will be money spent on propos or whatever else a similar theme may be.

Of course, the big advantage of the hired people is that they do this kind of activity every day and so know exactly what works and what doesn’t. There is less chance that the kids will end up in tears!

Well that’s what is meant to be the case and what the professionals will tell you.

Another advantage of outsourcing the children’s activities and any planning that goes with it, is that the parents can concentrate more on making sure they enjoy the day as well.

Hired party entertainers are so common these days that they cover all kinds of entertainment offerings and activities. A kids party may have jumping castles, reptile party show entertainment, paintball, clowns, magicians, fairies, makeup artists and face painters, animals of all kinds, home bowling, sumo suit wrestling, jelly wrestling, dinosaur suit parties, rock and roll parties, limousine hire and more.

Of course it is often the case that parents get into these kinds of activities as well, so the entertainers often do adult parties as well, or even market their services directly at them via online business web directories and the like.

It’s important to read the fine print on websites and advertising material and ask relevant questions when booking your entertainer, as they are definitely not all the same.

In one recent example, we became aware of, a mum decided to hire reptiles with a wildlife handler for her kids party in Melbourne. She phone a few places that she found on the web and went with what she thought was the cheapest outfit. After all, every snake show must be much the same, or so she thought.

However she was very disappointed. The snake handler turned up at the correct time and place and all seemed OK, until he demanded an extra $200 before he started. The problem was that he now said he had a limit of 10 kids at a party and there were 20 there. Of course you can’t send 10 kids home and so the mum paid out the extra $20 per child.

The disappointment didn’t stop there. It got worse when the kids weren’t allowed to hold any of the animals. The excuses and justifications were many and included the following. For frogs it was claimed that acids in humans hands kill them. For lizards and turtles it was alleged they all had salmonella and were therefore unsafe for the kids to touch. And for the snakes, there was this claim that allowing them to hold the snakes may send the wrong message to the kids and that they’d go out into the bush and handle dangerous species and perhaps get bit.

For the kids it was like being shown a birthday cake and not being allowed to eat any.

In Melbourne the original kids reptile party show does let kids hold the animals. They also don’t limit the number of kids who attend or charge extra over and above a given number. However the relevant questions are often not asked and so many parents get a second-rate experience for their kids at a time when it is too late to reverse the decision.

There is another reason why the kids should always be allowed to handle the animals at their wildlife and reptile show parties. This is for the photo opportunities. For young children’s parties and especially for kids under the age of 5 years old, most kids will not have an independent recall of the event after a few short years. Therefore the photos taken on the day, do in effect become the memory of the event.

The mother who booked the dud reptile show later saw a reptile party at her friends place where all the kids got to handle the critters. When she related her experience to the snake man, he replied it was the sort of complaint he got regularly. However he also confirmed that the lies and justifications given to not allow the kids to hold the animals also lacked merit. After all, his frigs had been handled by kids with dry hands every day for more than 10 years and all remained alive and well!

Nothing makes for a better memory of a kids reptile party than when there are lots of photos of the children at the show holding the animals. Kids parties may be a brief and fleeting affair for the adults, especially for the parents of kids who attend, as opposed to the party child.

However for the birthday child and their family, it may literally be a once in a lifetime chance to give the special child a day to remember.

Did I mention that there is also an unmatched educational experience in letting kids handle the animals. No amount of time spent with a teacher and a whiteboard will ever match the level of education gained from a hands on educational experience.

In a few weeks I fly off to the Gold Coast in Queensland. In the emantime here in Victoria, the weather is hot and the snakes are out and about.

It’s Christmas eve in 2011 and the temperature is somewhere near about 30 Deg C, although I think the sea breeze has kicked in to reduce the worst of it.

As I drive through bushy Warrandyte on the edge of Melbourne, Victoria to catch a snake that’s disturbed children playing by a swimming pool, I soon find myself rescuing yet another Tiger Snake from a shovel.

Melbourne’s had a fairly average December, in terms of average temperatures, but I must say, it hasn’t seemed particularly warm to me.

Yesterday (23 December) I had eight people calling Snakebusters wanting us to remove snakes from their properties.

Yes it was hot day of nearly 30 Deg C.

I only actually did two of the call-outs.

The rest were either given to other licenced snake catchers, or in some cases the people were talked out of getting anyone to remove the snakes.

You see, when a snake is seen disappearing under a back fence, or similar, it’s often better just to let them do that!

Let them dissapear and you will probably never see them again.

I give out this advice a lot and people are surprised that I am talking them out of paying me to come to their place to remove a reptile.

However I am ethical and there’s no way I’d come to a person’s place if I didn’t think I had a reasonable chance of catching the snake.

One call out I had this week was to remove a Brown Snake living under a boulder in a garden at Plenty, a bushland suburb in Melbourne’s northern outskirts, near Greensborough.

We had a bobcat earth mover and other gear and unexpectedly we were still unable to move the massive Basalt Boulder.

The rock was well and truly “stuck”in the ground.

Brown snakes are not stupid. They know where to hide and not get caught!

Not all the time, but yes, if any snake knows where to get good real estate to live in, then it’s a Brown Snake.

Brown Snakes are very common across Australia and due to their uninteresting colours and venomous nature are rarely kept as pets, studied or even liked by so-called reptile enthusiasts.

As the world’s leading researcher on these snakes, I have a different view and find them intelligent (by snake standards) and this view is reflected among snakes themselves, with Brown Snakes pushing most other venomous snakes around in the context of who goes where in Victoria.

I few years back I published a ground-breaking paper on social hierarchies in snakes.

As the snake man, in a few weeks I am going to the Gold Coast Queensland to do a snake handling course and no doubt the phones will be ringing hot again for snake calls in Melbourne.

You see the weather is hot and the snake calls come in, whenever I leave my home town.

Usually I spend Christmas at home and this year is no different. With Melbourne anticipating a forecast high of about 30 Degs C, it is likely I’ll have a few snake calls on Christmas day. If I don’t get a snake call out on Christmas day, I feel somewhat ripped-off.

As one who’s been doing snake call outs for decades, it really is a way of life!

As for the Melbourne kids part of things, well my kids have been with me for the last few days catching snakes and when I die, I am sure they will do their bit for wildlife conservation.

That’s when they finally get over those other kids hobbies like paying on skate boards and the new kinds that flex in the middle.

Another snakebite death of a snake handler has reinforced the need for expert training in snake handling courses. No one does them better than the Australian Snake Man Raymond Hoser.
Only the snake man Raymond Hoser has more than 40 years expertise in venomous snake handling, catching snakes, teaching others, doing training courses for snake handlers and more. Don’t take risks with no-name snake handler!

The Melbourne Zoo and it’s parent body, the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) of Victoria could never match the standards of Snakebusters when it came to quality and accurate reptile education, so rather than try to match the standards, they instead used their power as government authority to close down their competitor.

On 9 March this year and under instruction from the DSE, Snakebusters were closed down by a corrupt VCAT Judge, Pamela Jenkins.

She forced the immediate cancellation of tens of thousands of dollars worth of bookings for Snakebusters shows, events, school incursions, kids parties in Melbourne and more.

Many clients were forced to book with inferior alternative providers and many complained to VCAT, the DSE, the Minister in charge, Ryan Smith and others.

These people ignored the complaints and put the screws into Raymond Hoser and Snakebusters by making further false and defamatory claims against the company and staff.

However on 8 June 2012, some reason came into things and two judges in the Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal agreed that Judge Pamela Jenkins had unlawfully closed down Snakebusters and they immediately re-instated the right of Snakebusters to continue to educate children and others, including Australia’s only internationally rated snake handling courses.

However, re-starting the business operation was not as easy one would think.

Besides the fact that many thousands of dollars worth of bookings have shifted elsewhere due to a thought that Snakebusters may never resume business, several other serious problems arose.

Using Snakebusters registered trademarks, several inexperienced imitators have used SEO and other black-hat methods to rip off Snakebusters customers using the registered trademarks.

Snakebusters have been inundated with complaints by people who thought they had been booking us and had in fact been unlawfully approached by imitators pretending to be us.

So on our first day of business in June 2012, we spent much of the day sending out “cease and desist” letters to trademark bootleggers, instead of the e-mails to our clients telling them the good news.

Of course the real good news is that for the first time in three months mums and dads can book Snakebusters for their next kids party in Melbourne with a no risk guarantee.

Remember only Snakebusters have a perfect safety record and only Snakebusters have hands on reptiles parties where people can handle the animals as opposed to just a boring show and tell.

And yes, hold the animals is a trademark for Snakebusters reptile parties, so if you see someone else hocking their business using our trademarks, let us know.

You see we recently had a case of an impersonator claiming to pat a reptile is “hands on” and we don’t agree.

For us hands-on reptile party entertainment and education means people can hold the animals.